Posts Tagged ‘deleting facebook friends’

NOTE: the script is not functional at the moment (due to facebook API changes). I will remove this note once I make a new working version.

Update Sep 2014:

I've created a new version of the script which works on recent Facebook. Apparently facebook allows you to easily remove single friends nowadays; so the script is extra useful for deleting bulk friends or inactive friends.

To use the new script you don't even need GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey. Just follow these simple steps:

Follow the instructions of the tool to do whatever you please! (type FBDX.help(); at any time in the console to see help again)

Original Post:

I have Googled around on how to mass remove facebook friends from time to time. Unfortunately facebook does not allow that, because its bad for business; but many people are looking for a hack around. Back in the day, the mobile version had a much easier friend removal process, but they've made it similar to the desktop version and very boring.

The current method of removing a friend, involves either going to his/her profile or to your list of friends, hovering over friend-status button (first request), selecting unfriend (second request), confirming it (third request), approving the removal (forth request). Each of those asynchronous operations need to be done synchronously, because the confirmation dialogs take half of the page; so assuming each one takes half a second, it takes 3 seconds to remove a friend (on a delay-free connection).

Now what if you have 4000 friends (many of which are taking dust) and you want to remove around 3000 of them? Welcome to hell. If you take up the manual approach, you're bound to drop midway, because it takes more than 4 hours and drives you nuts.

There are scripts around that usually don't work, and are mostly non-user-friendly. I decided to filter my friend list today, and when I got to it, I realized it would be much better to spend those 4 hours creating something that others can use as well, instead of doing some repetitive work (which is literal hell for developers and hackers). So I made this script: